The 2018 Midterm Elections were historic in the number of women and people of color elected to congress. They were also notable for the changes in how people voted, who voted, and what that says about the future of U.S. politics and the sate of the media in this country. Below is a roundup of […]
2018 Midterms: Reactions Roundup Read More »
November 2, 2018 Joshua A. Tucker is Professor of Politics, an affiliated Professor of Russian and Slavic Studies, and an affiliated Professor of Data Science at New York University. He is the Director of NYU’s Jordan Center for Advanced Study of Russia. He is one of the co-founders and co-Directors of the NYU Social Media
Speaker Series on Misinformation: Joshua Tucker Read More »
The Information Disorder Update: November 5, 2018 Amid warnings of a looming civil war and an immigrant “invasion” from Central America, the 2018 midterm campaign has thrived on hyperbole and misinformation that have become weapons in an online battlefield. In this digital warfare, the angriest, most extreme voices have dominated the political arena. Finally, on
Midterms 2018: Trends in Information Disorder Read More »
The Information Disorder Update: November 1, 2018 With an unprecedented number of Muslim candidates running in the midterm elections, a virulent Islamophobic backlash has erupted in some districts — often laced with online mis- and disinformation. More than 90 American Muslims sought statewide or national office this year, and about 50 made it through the primaries, up
Muslim candidates face online hatred, disinformation Read More »
The Information Disorder Update: November 1, 2018 With an unprecedented number of Muslim candidates running in the midterm elections, a virulent Islamophobic backlash has erupted in some districts — often laced with online mis- and disinformation. More than 90 American Muslims sought statewide or national office this year, and about 50 made it through the primaries, up
Muslim candidates face online hatred, disinformation Read More »
Rules for the New Digital Economy Should Look to Old Common Law Traditions There are 39 million books in the Library of Congress. This impressive analog measurement pales in comparison, however, with the realities of the digital world. Every day connected computers create the data equivalent of three million Libraries of Congress! This startling fact
The Root of the Matter: Data and Duty Read More »
Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License. The views expressed in the Shorenstein Center Fellows Research Paper Series are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect those of Harvard Kennedy School or of Harvard University. Fellows Research Papers have not undergone formal review and approval. Such papers are included in this
The Fight Against Disinformation in the U.S.: A Landscape Analysis Read More »
Maria Hinojosa is anchor and executive producer for the Peabody Award-winning show Latino USA, distributed by NPR, and for PBS’s America By The Numbers with Maria Hinojosa. Her nearly 30-year career includes reporting for PBS, CBS, WNBC, CNN, NPR, Frontline, and CBS Radio, and anchoring the Emmy Award-winning talk show Maria Hinojosa: One-on-One. In 2010, Hinojosa created the Futuro Media
Information Disorder Update: October 30, 2018 Social media users have raised a chorus of complaints and allegations during the midterm campaign about the purging of millions of names from registration rolls to suppress voter turnout. Several state governments have responded that their critics are mischaracterizing routine and legally mandated maintenance of the rolls to keep them current
Social Media Becomes Battleground for Voting Integrity Misinformation Read More »
Information Disorder Update: October 30, 2018 Social media users have raised a chorus of complaints and allegations during the midterm campaign about the purging of millions of names from registration rolls to suppress voter turnout. Several state governments have responded that their critics are mischaracterizing routine and legally mandated maintenance of the rolls to keep them current
Social Media Becomes Battleground for Voting Integrity Misinformation Read More »
Information Disorder Update: October 26, 2018 Supporters of a private militia are spreading misinformation on social media about the Central American migrant caravan. One baseless claim asserts that “42,000 immigrants” intend to join the caravan. This warning appears to have reached tens of thousands of users on social media. Related posts on Twitter gained thousands of retweets;
False information about caravan animating militia activity at the border Read More »
Information Disorder Update: October 26, 2018 Supporters of a private militia are spreading misinformation on social media about the Central American migrant caravan. One baseless claim asserts that “42,000 immigrants” intend to join the caravan. This warning appears to have reached tens of thousands of users on social media. Related posts on Twitter gained thousands of retweets;
False information about caravan animating militia activity at the border Read More »
Abstract: This paper analyzes the changes in traffic from Facebook to non- profit news organizations before and after the major change to the Facebook News Feed in January 2018, implemented in response to the controversy over fake news dissemination from Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election in the United States. We find that while the
Dr. Claire Wardle, Shorenstein Center Research Fellow and founder of First Draft, spoke as part of the Misinformation Speaker Series organized by the Shorenstein Center and the NULab at Northeastern University. Conversations about information disorder in the US are disproportionately focused on political disinformation and the Facebook newsfeed. This talk argues that globally we should recognize
Dr. Claire Wardle on misinformation in the global context Read More »
Information Disorder Update: October 23, 2018 This newsletter issue from the Information Disorder Lab explores how mis- and disinformation can spread even after being denied mainstream social media access. A prominent advocate of conspiracy theories and pseudoscience publishes a series of online articles warning that leftists are fomenting civil war in the United States. A network of
Assessing a Case of Information Disorder: The Next Civil War Read More »
To get the weekly Information Disorder newsletter direct to your inbox, subscribe here. Warren DNA Confusion U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s ancestry video was designed to extinguish the lingering allegations against her, but instead appears to have fanned the flames of mis- and disinformation. When the Massachusetts Democrat released her DNA results on Monday, the backlash on social media reflected
The Information Disorder Update: October 16, 2018 Read More »
Yochai Benkler is the Berkman Professor of Entrepreneurial Legal Studies at Harvard Law School, and faculty co-director of the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University. Since the 1990s he has played a role in characterizing the role of information commons and decentralized collaboration to innovation, information production, and freedom in the networked
Renowned journalists Jill Abramson and Jane Mayer delivered the 29th Annual Theodore H. White Lecture on Press and Politics, a conversation with Shorenstein Center director Nicco Mele building on their original essay titled “The Press Has Never Been More Vital to the Survival of Democracy”, which is available to read below. In the essay, Abramson and Mayer discuss
Sarah Smarsh is the author of Heartland: A Memoir of Working Hard and Being Broke in the Richest Country on Earth (Scribner, September 2018), a finalist for the 2018 National Book Award. A freelance journalist and former professor of nonfiction writing, Smarsh covers politics and economic inequality for The Guardian, the Economic Hardship Reporting Project, and others from
Experiencing and Reporting on Rural America Read More »
A Weekly Scan of Information Disorder Welcome to the inaugural issue of a weekly newsletter on emerging issues and trends in the field of online information disorder, with a near-term focus on mis- and disinformation affecting the 2018 midterm elections. The newsletter is intended for journalists, academics, policymakers, information technologists and other stakeholders. Subscribe here.
A Weekly Scan of Information Disorder: October 5, 2018 Read More »
The Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy is a Harvard Kennedy School research center dedicated to exploring and illuminating the intersection of press, politics and public policy in theory and practice. The Center strives to bridge the gap between journalists and scholars, and between them and the public.
Unless otherwise noted this site and its contents are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.